As Nicholson began telling everyone about his latest movie, “The Last Detail,” which would be released in a few months, the phone rang and my grandfather, never one to have his lunch or a good story interrupted, asked me to answer it.

I walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Is Mr. Marx in?”, the voice at the other end said.

“Who’s calling?” I asked.

“I work at the NBC storage warehouse in Englewood Cliifs, New Jersey,” the man said. “We’ve got several boxes of 16mm reels of film from ‘You Bet Your Life’ and we were wondering if Mr. Marx wants any of it. If not, we’re going to destroy all of it tomorrow.”

You should read some of the horror stories regarding master tapes of hugely well-known albums/songs. Sometime in the '90s a warehouse in NYC that stored lots of original multitrack masters for various labels was going out of business and attempted to contact the labels/owners to come pick up their tapes. Apparently lots of them never bothered and the tapes got sent to landfills. D'oh.

Then you've got cases where labels decided to throw out the original mono mixes of lots of '50s/60s/early 70s material thinking that there'd never be a future use for them, despite the fact that the stereo versions weren't the ones that had been hits, were often haphazardly slapped together and sounded quite different than the original hit version, or were sometimes different takes altogether. There's a surprising amount of songs from that era that simply no longer exist in their original form except on vinyl, and many labels have had to resort to making needledrops from the cleanest copy they can find to reissue it on CD/digital.